Fitted mesh headaches :|

[Babette Ultsch]

Hi all,

what i have done yet was making a fitted mesh clothing from the provided (and updated \o/ thx ll) skeleton file. After a bit of  bumpy roads all went good eventually. Now i was suspecting it will kind of automatically fit to my shape. But it does not :/. I see that its bulging e.g. when i resize the belly and breasts. I was wishing that at least theoretically i could omit an alpha or that my body wont show that much through the dress.

To make it short:

the dress fits nicely on the standard av in my 3d program (as you can see on the sample picture its not good in some regions, but was just meant as quick test)

but in sl my body is poking all way through.

Now i wonder whether my expectations were too high?

Or was i misunderstanding the concept behind or is it just that way?

Or maybe i wasnt getting the weights right?

[MIstahMoose]

I wish I knew enough Maya to tell you. Most use Avastar because of the clarity that Gaia provides with rigging for second life. Doing it like you would for a normal game character tends to be extremely frustrating and unpredictable ;|

[Cathy Foil]

Unfortunately the type of mesh clothing you are trying to get to work with Fitted Mesh is the most difficult.  Very tight, skimpy mesh clothing that shows a lot of skin is the very hardest to rig for Fitted Mesh.  Well the rigging isn't hard it is adjusting the weights that is hard.

The reason it is difficult is that the avatar doesn't change shape using the same method as Fitted Mesh does.  The avatar mostly uses Morphs to change shape while Fitted Mesh changes shape by changing the scales of the Collision Bones.

The result is it is very difficult to get Fitted Mesh to change shape following the real shape of the avatar.  Loser fitting and clothes that cover up the avatar have a lot more room for error.  Tight fitting, skimpy mesh clothes has very little room for error.

I see you are using 3D Max?  Unfortunately I don't know that program.  The Wiki files do contain rigged mesh avatars that are weighted half way decent to the Collision Bones.  You might want to copy the weights from the avatar to your mesh clothing.  You might get a better result or at least a better starting point.  Here's a link to the Wiki download zip files:

WiKi Files

I wonder how many people who were pushing for Fitted Mesh now realize that Qarl's Mesh Deformer would have been the better choice?  It was way easier to use and worked best on tight fitting mesh clothing.  Fitted Mesh worked better for lose fitting mesh clothes though the Mesh Deformer could have been improved so it worked equally well.

With the Mesh Deformer you just rig your mesh clothing to the normal skeleton bones as we always done.  If you made your clothes to fit a different shape other than Ruth you just export that shape out of SL as an XML file and then in the DAE upload window add that XML file and click a few options that was it.

Hopefully the new CEO will see the best solution is for SL to have both Fitted Mesh and the Mesh Deformer but I am not holding my breath.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

[Babette Ultsch]

thank you for your reply Cathy,

it helps me seeing the problem between morphing and trying to make that up with binding and weighting to bones. I wish i was saving all morph targets back when the sl viewer had the "export avatar mesh" option. But that was dropped years ago unfortunately (and i wonder why). Anyone knows how one can still access this feature to make a set morph targets?

The other way would be probably changing weights and uploading a model for each try, then figuring how it behaves lol...

 

Mesh deforming sounds good, is it kind of binding the mesh to the vertices of the avatar body technically?

[Babette Ultsch]

thank you for your answer Mistah, Avastar sounds really like a great tool. I probably need to overcome my lazyness and learn blender

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

You can find all the morphs here:

Avatar Databank

[Gaia Clary]

Maybe i can add 2 remarks here:

 

1. You could use the Morph targets to create a dummy character and implement the SL Shape sliders to shape the dummy into the SL shape. Then you can use that dummy as reference for making your mesh garments of course. But note that the morphs themself take no active role in the fitted mesh deforming.
2. If you wanted to create something reasonable then you would create some sort of controllers that modify the Collision Volume bones. If properly done, then you could immediately see how your mesh would react in SL with changing slider values.

The main problem is to understand which bones are affected in which way by which slider. Most of this is noted down in the avatar_lad.xml file. And yes, in Avastar we actually have ported the SL Shape slider system into Blender:matte-motes-big-grin-wink: This works as intended for the dummy itself. But for the mesh garments there is still something wrong (so right now we do not have a complete solution :matte-motes-mad:)

BTW: Blender allows to export shape keys to Collada, so in theory you could take our workbench blend file, then export the character with shape keys, and then try to upload that to Maya. Maybe that works, maybe not, i have never tried it myself.

[Rhys Goode]

My experiments with womens tops have convinced me that "fitted mesh" needs to be cutsom fit to your avatar shape even more carefully than with the classic mesh.  And even then, not much chance for avoiding alpha masks.  

Yes, with fitted mesh, the clothing will respond to a lot more sliders than it would before, but .....   not the same way that the SL avatar mesh responds. It is particualry bad for breast buoyancy, the new LEFF_PEC and RITGHT_PEC bones barely change position at all for different settings, even though that setting has huge impact on the shape of the avatar breast.

Fitted mesh seems to be designed for long pants, and turleneck sweaters, where you can mask out the SL avatar, and do not really care if the shape of your clothes is the same as the shape of your body.

[MIstahMoose]

@Rhys

I think you need to experiment more, I have not encountered a problem where fitted mesh needed to be custom fit to the avatar. Why even make it fitted if it's rigged to your specific shape

[Nalates Urriah]

I'll suggest that you do some reading before giving up Maya.

Gaia has written about the problems and solutions she has built into Avastar. There is no reasons you cannot make the same corrections manually in Maya. I can't find her article on the export import distortions that have to be sompensated for...

Some older information here will help clue you into the size problems with import to and from SL that a mention above is here: http://blog.nalates.net/2013/04/23/second-life-shape-export/

[Astrid Kaufmat]

I think that Chaty is right ,without glasses I barely can read the photo but it seems to say 3ds max and the UI is for sure not maya so I guess it's max.

I also notice that on wiki page they updated the avatars it says last version April 15th 2014 .I don't know if they have done any fixing to the messy weight that the previous versions had.I have been a lot busy  with other RL  so I missed this new stuff, but I am going to check it later. see if that new folder can help too.

 

[Babette Ultsch]

thank you for all the insights and answers,

that helped me understanding things much better .

I also figured that i can extract the morph targets with the max_slav plugin, and yes astrid you are right i am using max.

One thing that still bugs me tho is how can you find out how the Collision bones change when the shape changes? I think this would be mandatory to make a valid rig in case one is able to set up a working morph target system.

Is that somewhere down in these mentioned xml files maybe?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

You don't have to extract the morph targets, you can download them. If I'm not mistaken you can also extract them from the *.llm files, if you know how to open those.

How the collision bones move and scale with the sliders (and the mBones, and how the morph targets are used with the sliders) can be found in the avatar_lad.xml file.

[Kantbe Thursday]

As a non-creator shopper, I certainly hope someone can make better sense of how the current mesh clothing works.  My partner likes my shape just the way it is, thank you very much, and the thought of changing my shape just to be able to wear something that doesn't fit me like an oversized sack just doesn't cut it.

I simply don't spend money on mesh dresses or tops any more because they I'm not satisfied with wearing what looks like my older sister's hand me downs.

 

- Kantbe